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The lost cause of the Lisp machines

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Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#71

Post by mietek »

Peteragain wrote: post #29

Okay they're dead, but I think the interesting thing here is the relationship between hardware and the way mathematicians (potentially) think about problem solving. The established practices massively constrain the solutions we find, but I do wonder what a Turing Machine would look like if FPGAs had been around in 1930. FPGAs keep getting used to implement processors, but using one to make a c interpreter and then us…

Some things have been tried; some things continue to be tried.

- Naylor and Runciman (2007) ”The Reduceron: Widening the von Neumann Bottleneck for Graph Reduction using an FPGA”: https://mn416.github.io/reduceron-project/reduceron.pdf

- Burrows (2009) “A combinator processor”: https://q4.github.io/dissertations/eb379.pdf

- Ramsay and Stewart (2023) “Heron: Modern Hardware Graph Reduction”: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3652561.3652564

- Nicklisch-Franken and Feizerakhmanov (2024) “Massimult: A Novel Parallel CPU Architecture Based on Combinator Reduction”: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02765v1

- Xie, Ramsay, Stewart, and Loidl (2025) “From Haskell to a New Structured Combinator Processor” (KappaMutor): https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-99751-8_...

More: https://haflang.github.io/history.html

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#72

Post by s0sa »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #54
jacquesm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get me started. I tried to use a very simply python program the other day, to talk to a bluetooth module in a device I'm building. In the end I gave up and wrote the whole thing in another language, but that wasn't before fighting the python package system for a couple of hours thinking the solution is right around the corner, if only I can get rid of one more little conflict. Python is funny that way, it infan…

[flagged]

Oh yeah? Well the jerk store called, and they’re running out of you!

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#73

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #61
rmunn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI will not go away, I agree. But many of the companies now betting the farm on AI are going to lose, and there will be server farms going for sale cheap. I'm hearing more and more people outside the tech world talk about the AI bubble, and predicting it's going to pop. When that happens and investors lose confidence, suddenly companies who need the next round of financing to pay off their current debts won't get it,…

> I'm hearing more and more people outside the tech world talk about the AI bubble, and predicting it's going to pop I'm juuust about old enough to remember the end of the Lisp Machine bubble (we had one or two at uni in the early 90s, and they were archaic by then). But obviously Lisp machines were the wrong way to go, even if they were a necessary step - obviously, hardware-mediated permanent object storage is the…

Lisp machines, Transputers, Transmeta, even RISC were all academic-driven bubbles. They were spun out of university research projects. (Transmeta went indirectly via Bell Labs and Sun, but it was still based on academic ideas.)

The culture was nerdy, and the product promises were too abstract to make sense outside of Nerdania.

They were fundamentally different to the dot com bubble, which was hype-driven, back when "You can shop online!" was a novelty.

The current AI bubble is an interesting hybrid. The tech is wobbly research-grade, but it's been hyped by a cut-throat marketing engine aimed at very specific pain points - addictive social contact for younger proles, "auto-marketing team" for marketers, and "cut staffing and make more money" promises for management.

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#74

Post by raverbashing »

jacquesm wrote: post #49
raverbashing wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but some still wants me to understand what a monofunctor is or something that sounds like a disease to do things like print to screen or get a random number I feel that is the biggest barrier to their adoption nowadays (and also silly things like requiring ;; at the end of the line) Pure functions are a good theoretical exercise but they can't exist in practice.

> Pure functions are a good theoretical exercise but they can't exist in practice. Well, they can. But not all the way up to the top level of your program. But the longer you can hold off from your functions having side effects the more predictable and stable your codebase will be, with as an added benefit fewer bugs and less chance of runtime issues.

Yes I agree, pure functions are good building blocks (for the most part), but I don't think the current abstractions and ways of bridging the FP and Procedural world are good enough

Also have you managed to eliminate the side effect of your IP register changing when your program is running? ;)

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#75

Post by jdougan »

larsbrinkhoff wrote: post #17
karlgkk wrote: post #4

“ I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will.” What? They’re awesome. They present a vision of the future that never happened. And I don’t think anyone serious expects lisp machines to come back btw.

See also: Amiga romantics. 8-bit romantics. PDP-10 romantics. Let them stay. Let them romantizice.

Smalltalk romantics

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#77

Post by logicprog »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #64
logicprog wrote: post #48

I'm a lisp machine romantic, but only for the software side. The hardware was neat, but nowadays I just want a more stable, graphically capable emacs that extends down through and out across more of userspace.

> emacs that extends down through and out across more of userspace Making something like that has turned into a lifetime project for me. Implemented a freestanding lisp on top of Linux's stable system call interface. It's gotten to the point it has delimited continuations.

Oh my god, that's so cool? Could I see by any chance? (Edit: found links on your profile, will read more)

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#78

Post by brabel »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #67

I'm not so sure it's down to the hardware. With something like 180-bit wide microcode store - a very very horizontal microarchitecture - the hardware sure was specialised, but I think it's fundamentally down to Lisp itself. I don't know a lot of Lisp. I did some at school as a teenager, on BBC Micros, and it was interesting, but I never did anything really serious with it. I do know about Forth though, so perhaps peo…

I am mostly a Java programmer but I really enjoy writing Lisp code. It’s not really weird in my opinion, but the programmer must format the code nicely for it to be readable. If you do that it looks like any other language to me , except it has very little syntax so feels a bit more pure. Similar to Forth which has essentially no syntax, just white spaces between tokens. In Lisp it’s just lists all the way. Just so you know, in lisp you can do procedural programming, ie line after line of instructions… it’s just not the common way to do things, people write much more functional code than in most languages.

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#79

Post by skeezyjefferson »

Peteragain wrote: post #29

Okay they're dead, but I think the interesting thing here is the relationship between hardware and the way mathematicians (potentially) think about problem solving. The established practices massively constrain the solutions we find, but I do wonder what a Turing Machine would look like if FPGAs had been around in 1930. FPGAs keep getting used to implement processors, but using one to make a c interpreter and then us…

> Okay they're dead

jesus christ dont say that around here, youll be swamped by fanatical emacs users describing various bits of lisp theyve written over the years and what they each do. it will send you insane

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